This study discusses the life and works of Larra and many of his beliefs and ideas. The chapters have been divided into three, traeting of Larra's social, literary and political satire that deals mainly with the high cociety of Madrid (Spain).

This study explored social judgment theory’s utility in a political comedy context. As a model of attitude change, social judgment theory describes attitude changes that occur in receivers of persuasive messages. Given that the type of humor used in the political comedy context requires the audience to interpret the message, audience processing of the humor is thought to resemble the processing of persuasive messages. This study explored the assumptions of social judgment theory in both a political comedy and a traditional news context. In order to explore how satiric messages impact the attitude change process, clips of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart or CBS News programs were shown to participants.Participants reported their attitudes and ego involvement regarding taxes and the job market prior to and after viewing the clips, which allowed attitude change to be identified. In addition, measures of audience activity, including ego involvement and political participation, were collected to explore the interplay of audience activity in attitude change. This project offered some support of social judgment theory’s utility in a political comedy context and reinforced the active audience assumption. / Department of Communication Studies

This thesis discusses Mark Twain as a political satirist in Nevada and during the Gilded Age. There are also chapters covering Politics and Slavery, Democracy and Monarchy, as well as Imperialism and War.

This thesis deals with the TV political satire. It characterizes the selected audio-visual session of the genre of the Czech and American productions. Programs from the Czech environment were Česká soda, S politiky netančím and Politické harašení aneb S politiky stále netančíme, 168 hodin and Kancelář Blaník. The American programs were The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and The Onion News Network. All these TV programs were initially characterized from formal and content points of view. Then, these American and Czech programs were compared from a formal point of view, for example, it refers to the use of music, language and visual comedy, parody, comedy hoax , etc. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Notions of community and civic participation, and the role journalism plays in establishing, reinforcing or disrupting them, have been part of American life since the early days of the republic. Equally American, and closely connected with them, are the ideas that our public institutions and elected officials are appropriate targets for both journalistic scrutiny and comedic satire. Press and speech protections that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson wrote into the Constitution have served journalists and satirists - and those who work both camps, such as Ben Franklin, Mark Twain and H.L Mencken - during critical times in our history. Indeed, the blurring of lines between news and entertainment, public policy and popular culture, is not a new phenomenon. Yet, re cent concerns that journalism is being subsumed within the larger field of mass communication and competing with an increasingly diverse group of narratives that includes political satire are well-founded. Changes in media technology and acute economic uncertainty have hit traditional news outlets at a time when Americans clearly want a voice they can trust to challenge institutions they believe are failing them. And during the first decade of the twenty-first century, none has filled that role as uniquely as Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show on the Comedy Central Network. When Time recently asked readers to identify "the most trusted newsperson in America," Stewart was the runaway winner. That matched an earlier survey by the Pew Center in which Stewart tied Brian Williams, Tom Browkaw, Dan Rather and Anderson Cooper as the journalist respondents most admire. Scholarly work on Stewart typically builds on surveys that show young adults get political information from his show (Pew, ANES). It also challenges his frequent claim that he is nothing more than a stand-up comedian peddling satire, and it argues that his shtick, which he calls "fake news," is actually a quasi-journalistic product. This study moves beyond those issues by reviving questions about the role news media play in creating community. It applies research though the method of the interpretive turn pioneered by James Carey, and challenges the notion that Stewart's viewers are no more than fans who tune in to him as isolated individuals seeking entertainment. It argues that they seek him out because the para-political talk he offers helps them connect with a larger community of like-minded fellows. It draws on Mills' distinctions between mass media and public media, and it uses Freud's interpretation of jokes as a vehicle to address ruptured relationships and wish-fulfillment to examine the demand for a public conversation lacking in the news offered by aloof network anchors who became the faces of broadcast journalism during the latter part of the twentieth century. Finally, it considers the broader implications this nexus between media satire and news reporting - and the communities that are building around it - has for journalism and its traditional role in our participatory democracy. Research for this study, especially ideas and perceptions about how mainstream media work, is grounded in my own professional experience of fifteen years as a daily newspaper reporter, political writer and press secretary in three major political campaigns. Ideas and observations about stand-up comedy come from a year-long ethnography of The Comedy Cellar, a stand-up club in Greenwich Village known for political humor, from numerous visits to tapings of The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Tough Crowd, and from interviews with a number of stand-up comedians (apart from the ethnographic work) and writers for those shows. Ideas about the interplay between traditional journalism and so-called "fake news," the narrative offered by Stewart and others, come from interviews with roughly a half-dozen nationally recognized journalists who reported on the 2004 presidential campaign. A significant amount of archival research in the popular press - specifically newspapers and news magazines - was necessary because it is a large repository for background into Stewart's professional life and training, and that is essential context for a specific dialogue about the changing landscape of American journalism. Finally, impressions and findings about Stewart's audience and the Americans who are increasingly turning to satire as a vehicle for information to locate themselves in our participatory democracy came largely from observations and interviews conducted in Washington D.C. for four days before, during and after the Rally to Restore Sanity. Early scholarship on the increasingly complex relationship between satire and traditional journalism has focused on the satirists and attempted to define their narratives as something more than comedy - some type of popular journalistic hybrid or emerging narrative that is a new form of journalism. This study acknowledges that debate but moves beyond it. In fact, it is grounded in the idea that although the television shows are new, there is nothing new about satirists using the media of their day to challenge powerful institutions, including public office holders. Instead, it approaches the rise of these satirists by asking what is happening in America that is causing citizens to turn away from traditional sources of news and information in favor of the narratives they offer. It examines the likelihood that the popular demand for Stewart's narrative signals a larger shift in the way Americans think about news and where they go to get it - away from institutional journalism and its longstanding ethos of objectivity and the authoritative voice and toward more independent voices that essentially return to iconic ideas of the press as a tool for building community and enabling conversations between publics rather than acting as the mass medium it did in the latter part of the twentieth century.

For the last decade, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (TDS), a (Comedy Central) cable comedy show, has been increasingly seen as an informative, new, even revolutionary, form of journalism. A substantial body of literature appeared, adopting this view. On closer inspection, it became clear that this view was tenable only in specific circumstances. It assumed that the comedic structure of the show, TDS' primary text, promoted cognitive polysemy, a textual ambiguity which encouraged critical inquiry, and that TDS' audiences perceived it accordingly. As a result I analyzed, through a dual - encoding/decoding - analytical approach, whether TDS' comedic discourse educates and informs its audiences in a manner which encourages independent or critical reading of the news. Through a multilayered textual analysis of the primary and tertiary texts of the show, the research presented here asked, "How does TDS' comedic narrative (primary text) work as a vehicle of televised political news?" and "How does TDS' audience decode its text?" The research identified flaws in the existing literature and the limits inherent to any similar endeavors. It became apparent that, due to TDS' comedic discourse and its host's political transparency, the primary text does not promote cognitive polysemy, because it offers one dominant reading that is easily deciphered. Furthermore, due to its specific comedic structure, the primary text does not encourage dissenting or critical reading of the show's presentation of the news. Close reading of specific audience-authored tertiary texts indicated that TDS offered a dominant encoded reading which was either easily accepted or slightly negotiated, according to the views of the news outlet presenting the TDS excerpt.

Points of Contention, an MFA exhibit, features fifteen works of relief-printed images from carved linoleum and layers of type printed with antique letterpress wood type. The work constitutes a visual exploration of dissatisfaction and disenchantment presented through the context of odd stories in the news and major current events, such as election politics and the closing of Hostess bakeries, as well as, NSA data collection and gun violence. This supporting thesis explores the conceptual and physical processes of creating the pieces, including researching other artists who have wrestled with similar topics and produced their own unique reaction and resolution through art. The paper also discusses the technical and mechanical side of the artistic process, especially the anachronistic attraction to the methods of letterpress and printmaking in a digital age. Finally, this thesis chronicles the artist’s sources of inspiration from cartoon monsters and brand mascots during childhood to letterpress printmaking.

The effects of knowing or not knowing the satirical nature of a piece of humor were examined and compared to the effects of disparaging humor. One hundred and twenty-six heterosexual undergraduate students (male: n = 43; female: n = 83) were randomly assigned a satirical or an offensive comic about gay men. Some of those who read the satirical piece were told of the satirical intentions of the author. Some of the predicted hypotheses were partially supported. Low SDO participants found the satirical comic, regardless of whether the author’s satirical intentions were explicitly told or not, less humorous and more offensive than high SDO participants. On the other hand, high SDO participants found the disparaging comic to be more humorous and less offensive than low SDO participants. The implications of these findings as well as the difficulties with measuring the effects of satire are addressed.

Entertainer or agent provocateur? The modern Canadian political cartoonist, historically speaking, possesses a split identity. The Gazette cartoonist Terry Mosher---a.k.a. Aislin---in his experience, career and involvement in the fall 1988 fight against free trade, illustrates the tension inherent in the identity of the modern Canadian political cartoonist. Mosher's experience offers a theory as to what circumstances might compel a cartoonist to break the cartoonist's compromise---an informal promise not to use their powerful platform to advance a coherent, systematic and specific political agenda or aim in exchange for editorial independence, journalistic "status," and proper financial remuneration---a state of affairs modern cartoonists are, under normal circumstances, happy to accept.

In contemporary society, political satire shows are prominent programs that seem to resonate with the viewing public. This thesis seeks to observe the meanings that generation Y attach to the Canadian political satire show, This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Focusing on the Canadian context, this research examines how members of generation Y view political satire shows, specifically This Hour Has 22 Minutes and if this show caters to their attitudes, concerns and interests more so than traditional news media. The theoretical framework guiding this study is the uses and gratifications theory. This research implements a qualitative phenomenological research approach in the form of focus groups. This study concludes that this generation still maintains, however, that when looking to be informed, they connect more with traditional news media given that these programs provide them with all the facts and stories in a more reliable manner. This study contributes to the field of communication because it demonstrates the rationale and experiences of generation Y in relation to political news.